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Hair Fair

Somewhere along a continuum between Nicolas Sarkozy’s ambivalence about being photographed shirtless and his ardor for the many talents of Carla Bruni, it seems, lies his admiration for the intellectual vibrancy of the United States. Two years ago, le président established the Conseil de la Création Artistique, or C.C.A., and invited various luminaries in the arts to ponder “the cultural politics of France.” This undertaking—the sort of thing that, if ever proposed by an American politician, would be excoriated as a sissy-pants boondoggle—amounted to a flowering of government-funded enthusiasm for the life of the mind and the urge to express what it means to live in a historic present when everything new is old and old is new and it’s all instantly globally accessible and nobody can figure out how to figure out what the hell it, whatever it might be, adds up to. Or quelque chose like that. One of the C.C.A.’s initiatives is Walls and Bridges, a yearlong project organized by Villa Gillet, in Lyons—a self-described “cultural institute dedicated to culture in all its forms”—that brings together American and French academics, writers, and artists for an assortment of highbrow networking and deep-thinker-friendly public events in New York.

Among the first of these was a Fair for Knowledge, a collaboration with Cabinet, the sui-generis “quarterly of art and culture,” that took place recently at the Brooklyn Flea, the weekend market whose cold-weather venue is the old Williamsburg Savings Bank Building, in Fort Greene. There, unobtrusively situated among the venders of boots, books, leather jackets, mink stoles, maps, prints, paintings, picture frames, jewelry, soap, face creams, and retro furniture, were six tables custom-designed for one-on-one conversations, each occupied by a theorist who was available to elaborate upon something to do with hair, the theme of the most recent issue of Cabinet.

For five or ten minutes, a serendipitous stroller could engage the essayist Cécile Guilbert in a discussion of the history of wigs, or the potential fashionableness of gray hair, or why anyone would be attracted to hair-printed underwear, then wander across the room to hear Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of philosophy, wax (or not) upon primate hairlessness (or hairiness) as an outward sign of the possession or lack of the faculty of reason. Upstairs, Sophie Wahnich, a historian, earnestly addressed the postwar shaving of the heads of French women who were known to have consorted with German soldiers or Vichy collaborators. Back downstairs, John Strausbaugh, a journalist and the author of several books about music and pop culture, riffed about the evolution of hair styles in rock and roll, citing images from his collection of old LPs. (“Elvis was a natural blond until after high school. He dyed his hair blue-black to look like a comic-book hero. . . . With every album, Bowie changes his hair style and his musical style. See, there’s that futuristic duck’s ass, and he’s kind of inventing the mullet.”)

Tucked into a corner near an A.T.M. (not a vestige of the old bank) was Laurel Braitman, whose subtopic du jour was trichotillomania, otherwise known as hair-plucking. Carefully arranged atop her table were a stuffed parrot, two laboratory rats, four mice, a squirrel, and the cast of a gorilla foot. One of the mice wore a punk getup, one resembled a miniature Pope, and a third, as Hamlet, held the skull of another mouse. A doctoral candidate in the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“I’m a serious scholar, let’s just get that out of the way”), Braitman a few years ago turned her research focus to the phenomenon of mental illness in non-human animals. “What really prompted the change was going to CVS to pick up Prozac for Oliver,” her now departed Bernese mountain dog.

Braitman’s article in the current issue of Cabinet, “Of Mice and Mania,” notes that “the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM) has listed hair plucking under ‘Impulse-Control Disorders Not Elsewhere Classified’ “—a distinction that she takes issue with. She has observed enough “photos of mice and rats with little bald spots on their heads, reverse mohawks, or hairless facial patches shaped like tiny ‘Phantom of the Opera’ masks” to convince her that not just humans pluck and that plucking by other animals can be triggered by many things, “including obsessive thoughts.”

From Brooklyn, Braitman was bound for Thailand, where she intended to spend a few weeks “hanging out with elephants.” She described the tableau on her desktop as “six degrees of stuffed rodents.”

“The gorilla cast is mine, but all the other taxidermy was borrowed from friends,” she said. “And the squirrel I put there just for color. I have no idea whether squirrels pluck.” ♦

Mark Singer, a longtime contributor to the magazine, is the author of several books, including “Character Studies.”